Many companies sponsor clinical trials for new drugs, medical devices, therapies, or treatment programs. Typical clinical trial sponsors include pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, medical device companies, clinical research organizations (CRO's), and site management organizations (SMO's). Clinical trials are often an important step before obtaining FDA approval for particular drugs.
Patients who have been diagnosed with a disease are often in need of finding appropriate clinical trials for new drugs, medical devices, or treatments to treat their disease. Patients with serious diseases may only have weeks or months to live, and thus the ability to find available clinical trials and information about those trials quickly and efficiently is invaluable. Unfortunately today, there is no effective system for quickly matching patients with clinical trials. Doctors are often not aware of all the clinical trials that are being performed in different geographic regions. Clinical trial sponsors have difficulty finding suitable patients for their trials because there is a lack of up-to-date listings of clinical trials, patients are geographically dispersed, many clinical trials require screening large segments of the population, and patients lack insurance coverage. Additionally, patients seeking on their own to find clinical trials which may help them often suffer from consumer confusion with regard to medical terminology and protocol information, and thus have a difficult time identifying appropriate clinical trials.
Clinical trial sponsors are also hurt by this problem, since the inability to quickly find acceptable patients to enroll in their trials delays development of their new drugs or devices and delays FDA approval. What is needed is a method of quickly and efficiently matching qualifying patients with appropriate clinical trials. What is also needed is a system that can match patient medical profiles and patient characteristics with clinical trial acceptance criteria for a wide range of clinical trials in dispersed geographic areas. What is also needed is a source of comprehensive information about diseases, drugs, medical devices, and clinical trials to provide patients, family, friends and health care professionals the necessary information to make informed decisions about which clinical trials are useful for treating various conditions, and other related information such as risks, benefits, insurance coverage, and other similar information.